Project Online: Getting to Project Web App

One recurring theme in early support calls on Project Online has been how to get to Project Web App (PWA). I’ll cover several options here, for different users, both administrators and general users. The usual issues are finding PWA through navigation, or getting Access Denied messages due to missing permissions or licenses.

First navigation in the role of administrator. As an admin the Office 365 Admin Center will look like this:

There are a coupler of routes to PWA, and the following screenshots assume the administrator has also been assigned a license for Project Online. The highlighted ellipses have a direct link – Projects – to the ‘default’ PWA site:

The other route is via the Admin drop down, then selecting SharePoint:

This will show all the available site collections (defaults to site collections in the left nav) and these are grouped into Website, Site Collections with Project Web App (PWA) and Site Collections. I’ve edited out the Url where <your_tenant> would be, just to protect the privacy of my colleague’s site.

If you click on one of the PWA sites it will bring up the site collection properties, then clicking on the Web Site Address will take you to PWA. To avoid this route of course you could save to favorites!

Now on to the users view of things, and introducing the part that permissions and licensing play in accessing PWA. If the user logs in via https://portal.microsoftonline.com the will land on the Get Started with Office 365 initially.

Same ellipses as the administrator, but until the user is assigned a license for Project Online they will not see Projects listed - just Office Store and Office.com. The administrator assigns licenses through the Admin Center, Users and Groups and then selects the User and assigns the licenses for Project Online, including Office Web Apps, SharePoint Online and Project Pro for Office 365 as appropriate. The Office Web Apps and SharePoint Online licenses may already have been assigned from another plan, such as E3. In my tests I didn’t see the Projects option until I had logged out and logged back in as the user.

To show the full experience, I have neglected to share the site with my new user – so even though I have the license for PWA, if I click on Projects then I see the following – Access Denied my user does not have permissions to access this resource. Ask the site admin to give you access or sign in with a different account.

Someone with permissions on the site, such as the administrator, would need to navigate to PWA, then click the SHARE option towards the top right, and they would see this dialog:

The administrator then adds the users name, and can also (under SHOW OPTIONS) set a specific level of permission. I have taken the default of Team Members for PWA. For full details of Project permissions the recently published administrator’s guide at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38827 is a must read. This is the Project Server 2013 version – so not all is applicable to Project Online. I understand a more tailored version for Online is in the works.

Success! No logout needed when adding permissions, but does take a short while before I can get to the site (and the direct link will also be in the e-mail sent to my account).

If I now remove the Project Online license from this user and navigate directly to the PWA Url (the Projects link will be gone) – I will get a message that is fairly descriptive – sorry, you don’t have a license to use Project Web App:

If I then removed the user from the Team Members group so the site was no longer shared with them then I would be back to the Access Denied message shown earlier.

So there you have it – navigation, licenses and permissions for PWA. I should also note, as the question comes up frequently, that you cannot share PWA sites to external contacts – they need to be licensed users for Project Online within your tenant.

*** Update 5/17

An addendum to this posting, and if you have been upgraded running on SharePoint online for a while, so have been upgraded before adding Project Online then you may have an issue with the Projects link - via the page <your_tenant-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/MyProjects.aspx. You will see "an unexpected error has occurred" and get an error in the ULS logs:

This is great, but what happens when you add a new PWA in the portal (aside from the default). Is there a way to edit the navigation in the 365 portal so they can get to it from there instead of always using the direct URL?

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I would say that a PMP Certification is highly respected within both IT & non-IT communities where strong project management skills are required. If you plan on a long term career as a project manager, then yes, even with your level of experience, I would
suggest getting your PMP. You can prepare yourself for the exam in one of the PMP trainingproviders likehttp://www.pmhigherlearning.com/">PMP BOot camp

So I have an organization of 16,000 staff and about half want Project. So I will need to share (at various levels) to @ 8000 staff members? Sounds tedious at best. I have various groups, but location groups would not work for role level additions. Any
ideas?

Brian, I am attempting to set up PWA on an Office 365 tenant. I have been through all of the steps that you describe and can see the default PWA site with both my personal and Admin accounts. I have ensured that both accounts have access to the PWA Site
collection and have a Project Online license assigned against them, but I still receive the error "Sorry, you don’t have a license to use Project Web App." – Surely this shouldn’t be happening?

So maybe I didn’t wait long enough. Even though I apparently had access to PWA and was seeing the site collection, I received that error. After about an hour I refreshed the page and as if by magic the error disappeared and I started to see the content
behind the various links.

Hi, great post. I have followed this, but I still cannot open a project that has been saved onto PWA from another account, I cannot open this in MS Project for Office 365. It throws up a message saying that there are permissions problems. I have followed the directions in your post and it still says that there are permissions issues.

Not sure why you wouldn’t see the Project tile Ben, but can you navigate directly to https://.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa. In the admin Portal under SharePoint can you see and create PWA sites? You need to have at least a Project Online (Professional or Premium) rather than just a Essentials (previously called Lite) license.
Best regards,
Brian.

Hi I have newly started using project online at work however did not set up the portfolio etc. I did have access to everything but recently I have not been able to see all the project sites. Even the owners can not see the project sites. I also have web admin and web owner access so find it weird. Can anyone help with this. I basically need access to all the project pages as I do the updates but now can not update the risks and issues due to this.

Please get your Office 365 administrator to open a support incident through the O365 Admin Portal Ajay – you pay for that benefit through the subscription and that is the best way to get this resolved. Not much I can help with via the blog as we would need to confirm the tenant details and sites etc.
Thanks,
Brian.

Cheers, I.m waiting for IT to raise the request but just wondered when I go on these pages it give me a permission request page however no one knows where it goes which is weird. Do you know who has ever encountered these similar problems before. It is a long shot I know but thought id ask

Cheers for you help in November. Got it sorted and IT managed to figure out the settings / permission stuff. I just wondered if you knew a way of pulling off all the project summaries within Project Online. As I have been tasked to record these every month for a programme update pack and find it a pain going into each project and copying the Status Summary in each project status page for each project.